The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back

In a sense, tribalism and religion and the rest of it use a separate processing system. As Hamid, Atran, and their coauthors wrote, “Sacred value choices involved less activation of brain regions previously associated with cognitive control and cost-benefit calculations.”

The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot updated the model in a 1982 book about fractals to posit that comedians who have made appearances in the past are more likely to make them in the future. Nicholas Taleb carried Mandelbrot’s concept into his book Black Swan, and in his book Antifragile put a specific math to the notion that as an idea survives, it

And it shows that someone experiencing poverty is intensely distracted at all times. They are literally impaired by it. He went on to write a book about this work with psychologist Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.

As Slovic described it in a 2006 paper with psychologist Ellen Peters, “People judge a risk not only by what they think about it but also by how they feel about it. If their feelings toward an activity are favorable, they tend to judge the risks as low and the benefits as high; if their feelings toward the activity are unfavorable, they tend to mak

Fischhoff had discovered that we humans are not the insightful historians we think we are, concluding that “the feeling that we understand what the past was all about may prevent us from learning anything from it.”

The innermost loop is human behavior as we inherited it, the natural tendencies and autopilot functions that evolution gave us.

It’s our greatest success as a society to have devised systems for settling our differences, measuring the immeasurable, sorting through controversy. It’s not easy, and the work isn’t finished. Mediation, negotiation, deciding which of two bad choices is less harmful—that’s the very hardest stuff of modern society. In some cases, we’ve barely begun

Whether we’re subjected to a mysterious selection system or handed recommendations by a system we don’t understand, our unconscious tendencies and the mysterious processes of technology and business are consistently coming together to change our behavior, put us in the loop, and make us into people we never consciously intended to be.

The second loop is the way that modern forces—consumer technology, capitalism, marketing, politics—have sampled the innermost loop of behavior and reflected those patterns back at us, resulting in everything from our addiction to cigarettes and gambling to systemic racism in real estate and machine learning.

In a single paper, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” they laid out a dozen systematic biases and a trio of heuristics—calling them representativeness, availability, and anchoring—that form a trinity of human weirdness.